Please note: This was screened in July 2025
She wrote; he directed: Joan Didion’s modern classic is adapted by Frank Perry in this elliptical, introspective interrogation of 1960s Hollywood starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.
Joan Didion’s Play it as It Lays rocked the literary world in 1970, with its bleak take on the hangover of 1960s hedonism. This 1972 film adaptation stars Tuesday Weld as Maria, an actress discarded by her former director-turned-husband for a younger woman. An understated Anthony Perkins co-stars as B.Z., Maria’s gay best friend, drawing on the chemistry between Weld and Perkins after they played a couple in the cult black comedy Pretty Poison.
During the 1960s Frank Perry worked with his wife Eleanor Perry: she wrote, he directed and together they made a string of subversive literary adaptions (including The Swimmer, also screening at this year’s festival) to critical acclaim and commercial success. Their film partnership ended along with their marriage in 1971. In his first post-marriage film, Frank Perry evolves his visual style with an elliptical approach reminiscent of Alain Resnais: as Maria paces around a manicured garden, she ruminates on her life in an alternately dreamlike and abrupt manner.
Drifting from the beach to film sets, Maria cruises labyrinthine LA highways and revisits her childhood home in the Nevada desert. Experience this nihilistic tour of American iconography at the UK premiere of the 4K restoration.
A 4K restoration c/o Universal Pictures and Park Circus. Presented as part of Other Ways of Seeing, with support from BFI Awarding Funds from National Lottery.